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Time management helps stress management
Albert Einstein said “Time is an illusion” Yet time feels very real when you’ve got so many things on your plate and you’re struggling to get them all done at once. Especially as a small business owner these days. We all suffer from the stress brought on by extreme pressures on our time. The pressures of trying to meet deadlines while also trying to stay on track with our other responsibilities, and yet we never seem to get everything done. There just never seems to be enough time in the day.
Why is this?
No wait… A better question here is if there really isn’t enough time in the day OR are we just not managing the time we have properly? William Penn, a late 17th century English colonial proprietor once said: “Time is what we want the most but what we use the worst”. Most people don’t fully know where all their time is going and/or are usually spending their time on mundane tasks. By learning to properly manage your time, you can reduce your stress levels dramatically which will in turn improve your work productivity.
So, here are my top three tips to get you started on managing your time:
1 Know where your time is going
This is a big problem for most people. Especially small business owners as we are usually not accountable to anybody for how we use our time. This is a trap! We NEED to know where our time is going AND we have to hold ourselves accountable for where we spend our time. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Lost time is never found again”. This shows how important it is to know where your time is going to ensure that the time is being spent where you want to spend it, and to ensure that it is actually achieving something.
2 Put a value on your time
Everyone has the same number of hours in a day and yet some people still manage to be more productive than others with that time. What separates them? It’s usually that the successful people know what the value of their time is. As a small business owner, this should be between $200-$300 per hour. However, most business owners value their time far too low, which usually ends up with them working on mundane tasks whereby they could’ve just hired someone else to do for far less.
Tasks that you would usually pay someone $20-$25 to be doing. As Diogenes, a Greek philosopher said, “Time is the most valuable thing that a man can spend”. So put a proper value on your time then ask yourself: “Is this job that I’m doing worth $300 an hour”? If it’s not, delegate the task onto someone else who could do it for $25 an hour. Putting this value on your time will have a major impact on the way in which you’ll view spending your time and the tasks you spend it on.
3 Make time to make time
Pretty self-explanatory. Take out 30 minutes at the start of your day before work every day to sit down somewhere and create a checklist of all the tasks you need to get done in the day. It will help you keep track of the things that you need to do during the day. And will give you a clear understanding on what your top priorities for the day are. This will then allow you to delegate tasks so you can focus on the important ones. That way, even if you can’t manage to get every single thing done then at least you will have completed the important tasks.